1. What's the smallest nuclear explosion possible?

1. What's the smallest nuclear explosion possible?
2. What's the largest combustion engine possible?

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1. my farts
2. your're mum lol

Don't extremely small nuclear explosions occur almost all the time? Almost everywhere?

Project orion was an external nuclear piston "engine"

The thing is, the minimum amount of critical mass required almost always guarantees that man-made nuclear explosions are relatively large.

You can scale down nukes a lot

But it's still going to be something gigantic like 500 tons of TNT equivalent

Plus you are wasting the potential of the plutonium/uranium to make a nuke that small, a minimum critical mass bomb can produce an explosion over 15 kilotons

While there's tremendous energy available in the fuel required to form a critical mass, the detonation can be arbitrarily inefficient. Indeed, it's difficult to prevent it from being very inefficient (fizzling), by blowing itself apart into a subcritical mass after releasing an amount of energy comparable to a chemical explosive.

For an internal nuclear detonation engine, this may be seen as a desirable quality, since the unreacted fuel is not necessarily lost, but may be captured and reformed into a new critical mass.

you don't want detonation in an ICE

There are far better ways of getting work out of fission than via explosions.

You just took simple words with complex contexts and ideas behind them and then asked a juvenile question that demands a generalization for the answer.

this board is for 18+, not teenagers with unhinged ego's.

Underrated

>2. What's the largest combustion engine possible?

Fucking huge; barge engines have over one hundred thousand horsepower.

project orion?

>1. What's the smallest nuclear explosion possible?
>The M-28 or M-29 Davy Crockett Weapon System was the tactical nuclear recoilless gun (smoothbore) for firing the M-388 nuclear projectile that was deployed by the United States during the Cold War. It was one of the smallest nuclear weapon systems ever built, with a yield between 10 and 20 tons TNT equivalent (40–80 Gigajoules)

>2. What's the largest combustion engine possible?

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I wish we lived in a world where we built mega machines that needed building sized engines.

We do.

Can't they just collide two atoms of Pu/U in the LHC?

fission is splitting..

You think they split it with a knife? They literally just smash the atoms together to break the nucleus apart. That's what makes them split into smaller elements.

You can easily induce detectable fission with a particle accelerator or by using radioisotopes to generate neutrons (that's how it was discovered: through Enrico Fermi's experiments using a polonium-beryllium neutron source on uranium samples), but you won't get net work out of it.

Mostly they collide protons to cause a spray of matter-antimatter pairs generated from the energy of the collision. Knocking atomic nuclei apart is rather boring at this point compared to observing the short-lived exotic particles generated by high-energy collisions.

No. Chemical reactions just separate atoms within molecules from one another. Nuclear fission separates protons within atoms from another.

You can make a nuclear bomb arbitrarily small (atomi size limited) if you have a near perfect neutron mirror. Near perfect neutron mirrors do not currently exists and probably require exotic matter

Internal combustion nuclear engine?


HAHAHAHAHA my sides.

excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and saviour lmgtfy?